Magnusson
by Moonlighter
Summary: A well-meaning alternate take on the original 'Son of M' miniseries: a sort of What-If that dares to ask, "What if Son of M had been...better?" Takes place after Avengers Disassembled/House of M, featuring Quicksilver and various supporting characters.


_Disclaimer:  
Follows a work of fanfiction intended for entertainment purposes only, the creation and publication of which earns its author no monetary profit. All recognizable characters and referenced canonical events are property of Marvel Comics Incorporated._

**Notes:**  
This is a work in extended progress inspired by the _Son of M_ miniseries, which to be brief and frank, I personally found to be flawed in many ways. Nonetheless, it inspired me to dabble again in the world of Marvel Fanfiction. This story is not quite a what-if, not only poking fun, and not an entirely half-hearted effort to repair or contest Mr. Hine's own attempt -- but I hope it amuses readers at least as much as it has this author. That said, _Magnusson_ will make a tremendous amount more sense (particularly its in-jokes), after reading _Son of M_. Feedback is always welcome and encouraged: I write, not bite, and so should you. Enjoy.

**~~~~~~~Magnusson~~~~~~~**

_I was the fastest living creature on the planet. So fast I was a blur to human eyes. Bullets couldn't touch me. I could run up the sides of tall buildings ... snatch an arrow out of the air. I was a machine built for speed. Zero to sixty in seven seconds. A top speed of almost 220 miles per hour. Adapted to withstand the accelerated impact of my feet hitting the ground thirty times per second. My bones could absorb shocks that would shatter those of ordinary men. My tendons had the resilience of high tensile steel. My body metabolized food so efficiently there was virtually no waste. I never carried an ounce of excess fat. My brain processed information at five times the speed of the average college graduate ... data leaping from synapse to synapse, giving me split-second reactions ... allowing me to outthink twenty opponents at once. I was more alive than ordinary mortals could ever imagine. I could run across the surface of water. I could outrun a hurricane. I was like the wind. Like a bolt of lightning. I was perfection. I was Quicksilver._

Was. So yesterday, that spent little word. Was.

Well, he's been in one bottle or another ever since. That's the first thing you need to know.

The second might be that he still loves his wife; otherwise, that he's always loved his daughter. Even has visiting rights, Crystal said so before moving to the moon. (Don't ask -- she didn't.) Thirdly, keep in mind that there's one person in the world who he's been through more with, good and bad, than any two people combined: his twin. Wanda might be dead, maybe worse. More to the point, she's the one who ruined him before abandoning him. He loves her anyway, couldn't help it if he tried.

You might notice Pietro Maximoff has issues. Abandonment issues, for example --started when he was born and hasn't let up yet. Get this. His mother loved her newborn babies so much she hobbled outside alone and froze to death, breastmilk and all. The midwife loved herself so little she passed the twins off to someone more qualified, who ran away, so next she passed them off to someone less qualified, who stuck them in suspended animation for decades before passing them off again. The Maximoff gypsies didn't know any better either, and took them right in. Three guesses what the babies got to eat that night.

Nothing too traumatic happened until the whole incident with villagers tearing the camp apart and beating their father to pulp while their mother burned alive locked inside their caravan. Things like that tend to blur. Speaking of which, damn, can Pietro ever run. That's what he remembers best from his childhood. Running saved Wanda's life and running kept them alive. What food that he couldn't catch wild, what else that villagers wouldn't sell to gypsies, he just stole. Or tried. Sometimes they went hungry all the same, which distracted them from the cold, which made them brace together against the loneliness, which helped them feel less afraid. So it all balanced out, which must be why they barely remembered any of it for years and years. Blur blur blur. Time to move on.

Drank the last of the Absinth that morning. Used to be, he could run across the Atlantic to Europe for more. Not anymore. Never again, in fact. Was was was. Caught the fifteen-after bus to the corner store -- well, it's nearish the corner store ... okay, it's the nearest liquor store. No Rumplemintz in stock. Jaegermeister's impossible to keep cold enough in his place. If not for blocking a hole in the wall, he would've tossed that fridge last time it curdled the milk. Hates seeing food go to waste. Issues and all. Vodka it is then. Again. Missed the bus coming back.

Been drinking by the window ever since. If only Carol Danvers could see him now. He wanted to cry the first time he thought about it. The Avengers. Used to get that proud father look from Captain America himself, back in the day. A few refills later, he fell out of the chair laughing. And drunk. Then he cried anyway. He loved being an Avenger, being Quicksilver, a hero among the world's mightiest. He loved having a family, being needed, feeling special, barely normal enough to belong. Perfect. Was Was Was.

Had the thing tuned and signaling before he could decide against it this time. Might not even work, this glorified baby rattle of a radio that Crystal gave him when she said he could call her -- who knew, because Crystal's given him lots of things, like her hand in marriage when she said until death do us part. No response from the full moon above. Someone shouted in the alleyway below. Radio went flying over the rail as he fumbled down the fire escape to the rescue.

Fight didn't last long. Took Pietro longer reflecting on it from the pile of trash he landed in than it took to wind up there. Some punk was harassing some guy ... actually they were both punks, ones genes just happened to have an X-factor that just happened to have survived Wanda's little episode. Lucky fool. Anyway, typical gang violence. Pietro stepped up just in time to get sucker-punched. He was lying there covered in alley filth contemplating another drink when Spider-man entered the scene and cleaned house.

Never one to stay where unwanted, it seemed as good a time as any to go take another cold shower -- next thing Pietro knew, webbing yanked him to the roof. What a rush. The familiar sound of wind rushing by his ears, the foreign noise of speech at proper speed. Oh, and apparently he's a bad guy now. How swiftly they forget.

"Hey there, Pietro. C'mere. I want to talk to you."

Equilibrium not what it used to be -- trip up left him nauseous and struggling for a foothold, if not for a comeback. "And this is how you address a senior Avenger?"

Spider-man jerked somewhat. "Funny, I didn't see your name on the roster. In fact, the last time I saw you, your daddy was crushing you to a pulp. I can't say I blame him."

"Well, no one asked you. Besides, not the first time my 'daddy' has tried to kill me." Was that out loud? Not like he keeps count or cares or anything.

"Oh, whoops, was that my queue, Pietro? Am I supposed to feel sorry for you, after you wrecked my life?!"

Spider-man, being a good guy, grabbed Pietro, being a bad guy, and threw him against the stairwell wall. "Why -umph- why would you? After all, look at me! I'm only living like a fugitive. I have only lost my family, my career, my speed, my life. Everything."

"Well, Pietro, you know what? **Ha. Ha.**" Spider-man unclenched one fist enough to point. "What about that poor kid down there? You think that would have happened to him if you and your sister hadn't screwed up the whole world?"

No, of course ... wait a minute. "That mask must be depriving you of oxygen, Spider-man, if you failed to notice hostility toward mutants has been happening since before we were even born."

Spider-man spoke louder, faster. Pietro used to goad people into doing that just so they would be easier to understand. "How about the thousands of lives you destroyed -- all those mutants who aren't mutants anymore. How do you think they feel?"

"Wow, let me ponder that -- maybe they feel precisely the same as _I_ do, you idiot." He could almost sense it coming, the breaking point. Spider-man leapt like, well, like a spider, taking Pietro by the lapel of his raincoat and shaking him with each word. Pietro didn't resist. He'd left his fight in the gutter. No, he'd left it in the House of Magnus. Much more of this and he'd lose his dinner next, every last 80 proof fluid ounce.

"Then how about me, you selfish piece of garbage?! I had a little boy, in this perfect world you and your sister made for us. The woman I loved, a woman who died, was alive again. We had a baby! I've lost my son! They say the worst thing that can happen to anyone is having to bury your own child. Well, let me tell you, Pietro, there is something worse. My son is dead, and I can't bury him, because he never existed. I can't even tell my own wife. This morning, you know what? I'm sitting there with all these memories whirling around in my head. I'm grieving for my dead son and she's telling me some joke she heard on Letterman. And she wonders why I'm not laughing!"

Odd. When a megalomaniac tried to murder Luna and almost killed Pietro, he blamed no one but himself -- same when it didn't work out with Crystal again. Still. He peeled himself off the cement he'd been dropped to at some point. Spider-man stood looking away now. Alone by choice, not by necessity. Unhappy by chance, not by nature. "You have a wife who lives with you, talks to you, tries to make you laugh, cares if you do not -- was I supposed to feel sorry for you now? Wanda didn't make you love a dead woman more than the one you married ... and I didn't make her put things back."

"Huh. Takes you both working in tandem to fuck things up this badly. Good to know." Under the mask, his eyes were probably closed. His head probably wasn't spinning, either. "It was so **wrong**, Pietro. Why'd you do it? Why didn't you do it right? Why didn't you _undo_ it right? What was even the point then? What was your fantasy like? What's the capital of Cuba?"

"Miami. I had no 'fantasy', not other than that Wanda should live and be well. It was never about me. You have to understand ... they were going to kill her. Because she was sick, because she was sad, because she was powerful enough to do something about it, and not powerful enough to know better. They were going to kill my sister."

Something about the way Spider-man snorted almost indicated that he didn't quite disagree. "Gee, that would have been much worse. Looks like she's as good as dead anyhow. To be perfectly honest, I kinda hope she stays that way. To be brutally honest, I kinda wonder that she didn't do you the same favor, instead of taking away your mojo and leaving you for screwed. Unless she's as fond of you as everyone else. I'll let you decide though. Is this a fate worse than death or what, Pietro?"

Oh yes, and more besides. Et tu, Wanda? Oh yes, and her little dog too. "...I -- Enough. Listen. I'm sorry. What else can I say. If I could do anything to put this right, I would ... but I cannot. You saw, I can't even win a fistfight. God, I can't catch the fucking bus." Stop talking, drunk. Pietro came to the ledge Spider-man had been staring off of all this time.

"I guess that makes you a waste of space, doesn't it?" When you put it that way. Who would put it that way? A good guy, that's who. An Avenger. A hero. A mutant who got to keep his mojo. "It does." Long way down. Always further to fall. Somewhere below laid Crystal's shattered radio. Just as well. "Maybe you're right."

"Damn straight I am. Uhm ... about which part?"

The familiar sound of wind rushing by his ears once again.

"Pietro?"

The foreign noise of speech at proper speed never more.

"PIETRO!"

People commit suicide when they believe the world and everyone in it would be better off without them. That's the final thing you need to know. In addition to what happens next.


End file.
